Series foreword – part one April 29, 2010

This was the question that repeated over and over in my head for the first issue of Magic of Myths. Over and over as I tried to hammer out the story and totally restructure a 22 page per issue series into a five page per issue miniseries.

What the hell have I done?

Creative insanity is often something writers and artists dabble in, under the (usually fun, if no less painful) pursuit of a challenge. And I certainly found it by taking on this little effort.

Let me start at the very beginning. Magic of Myths (or Magic, Myths and Mythology as it was initially known as) was designed to be a limited series pitch to Marvel Comics during 2003 when the company had opened its doors to fledgling creators to find new talent. After putting together a story for Silver Surfer and a series pitch for Sleepwalker (the first issue of that was written and completed, ready for submission to Marvel, not knowing that now superstar writer and Image Comics bigwig Robert Kirkman was doing the same, which would have instantly put paid to my efforts) I turned my mind to an original series that would feature all-new characters. It was about a young man called Adam, trapped in a world which boasted familiar tropes and genre conventions, playing off them for a humorous effect while allowing the audience a quick frame of reference to make the series a bit easier to take in. It featured gods, mythological creatures, and adventures which spanned across various genres to allow for a nice change of tone and pace as required.

Then Marvel closed its doors on the new submissions/new creators programme under the sheer weight of its own popularity. And so MMM was resigned to a space on my hard drive, with a series map, concept and several pages of the opening issue never to see light again… until 2007.

That was the year Futurius co-owner and publisher, Daniel Lundie, personally asked myself and highly regarded indie artist, Sergio Calvet, if we wanted to do a project with him. It would be an anthology piece featuring three stories, each around five pages long, and some bonus material at the end – two stories done by Dan, the other remaining story done by myself and Sergio. At the time it didn’t take long for me to accept the offer – my previous and current comic projects had stalled under a bad combination of publishers running out of money, disintegrating entirely or their owners disappearing altogether. I’d literally gone from writing three whole series, to all projects hitting a brick wall due to issues outside my control.

So I dusted off MMM to see what could be done with it. Naturally the 22 page format wasn’t viable anymore, but given the early stage of the plans I had for the series I could work around that. The series would have to be shorter, but again I could factor for that. And when I asked Sergio if there was anything he wanted to draw or for the series to feature, I made changes where I could, including that ‘Adam’ evolved into ‘Eve’, which threw the story dynamics into a wildly different direction than I originally planned, but actually made it far more interesting as a result.

And MMM rose from its ashes.

Until I actually started to plot out the first issue and break everything down. At which point, my head exploded.